Vertical lines indicate the following events in Austria:
In summary, our results suggest that people are expressing more anxiety since the outbreak of Covid-19, but also increasingly talk about cooperation, supporting each other and express empathy for people who are in some way concerned by Covid-19. The decrease in anger may suggest that people were relatively satisfied with the first measures. At the same time, however, they also became increasingly sad, possibly anticipating the rather lonely times ahead. The smaller increase in positive emotions may indicate that they also try to focus on positive aspects of the crisis.
These plots were created in the same way as the Twitter Plots, except that we average the frequency of terms per posting instead of the number of postings containing the terms to account for varying lengths of postings.
By moving the mouse over a data point, additional information (including the number of observations “N”) is displayed. Clicking on a line in the legend, removes the line from the plot. Double-clicking on a line in the legend, isolates that line.
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We collected text messages from a chat platform for young people in Austria, starting on January 1st, 2019. Text messages were matched with terms associated with the emotions “anger”, “anxiety”, “general positive emotions”, “prosocial emotions” and “sadness” (from the LIWC dictionaries). The occurrence of words was counted to compute the level of each emotion in the text messages. The year 2019 was used to establish emotional baselines. Emotion time lines show the increase or decrease of emotions over this baseline emotion level.
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